Being black, being poor, being young, being cheap, has always had me appreciate the creative solutions in life.  These are the bootleg contraptions, the ghetto gadgets, and the things that made life easier because no matter how it looked the goal was completed.  The television worked, the grill cheese got cooked, and the car was fixed.  I am a lifetime member to the Creative Solutions & Concepts Gang.   Seems like our membership is worldwide.  The following things are the top ten creative solutions I have witnessed in Liberia. These have been added in my handbook and could be in yours.  Sometimes the job has to just get done. Please feel free to add your own CSC and send to me.

10.  Go DJ, That’s my DJ.  Yeah, we have DJs in Africa. PA systems and all that.  We are not that much of a third world country that we can’t mix up the CDs. (no vinyl, let it go) However, the equipment that première DJ Scratchy Scratch must use is somewhat outdated, so after the wires get pulled back and forth and strapped to equipment like a spider weaving its web, on the top of the whole thing they sit a fan facing face down.  Turns out there is NO cooling system and if you leave the fan at home, then the system will overheat and possibly burnout within the hour.  In fact, the systems are sold with a custom air fan in the street shops.  You talk about heating up the stage!  Don’t dance to close!

9.  This one is no surprise, we see the pictures in National Geographic all the time, still you cannot get over the sight of a mother with the baby strapped on her back.  What makes it even better is the fact she is balancing today’s market fruits on her head and then using her hands to hold the hands of the walking children.  This is MULTI-TASKING to the fullest.  And the little bundle of joy is wrapped up tight with their head bobbling to the bounce of the moving buttocks caught up in the world around them.  Yet, the pro babies just go to sleep, this is nothing new to them.   Recently, when we gave out the free toys and dolls to the village kids, a couple of girls grabbed cloth and tied the baby toys on their back.  CSC is passed through to the generations!

8.  To get to a place is imperative. Transportation is scarce therefore it is also a moneymaker. People have places to go and things to do.  So, it is very common to see a vehicle packed to the handlebars.  In a typical backseat there are five people, a pick-up truck bed fits 15-20 standing, yet the reason why car-ridding is on the list is because, if the need is great enough, there will be a grown person sitting on the LAP of the driver!  Worry about the driver’s ability to see? Not a problem, because the rule is that if you are sitting on the lap of the driver, you MUST put your head and top part of body out of the window.  Kind of like the dogs we see in the suburbs.

7. I didn’t find this one out until I did my own brief stint of weave rocking.  After removing my braided in weave and throwing it in the trash, I came home to find Justin had placed it all in a bag.  He presented it and asked did he want me to sale it.  Sale it for what?  Turns out, I am the only person who didn’t realize weave was reusable and since I wasn’t planning to rock anymore hairstyles there were two neighborhood women who had dibbs on my leftover tresses.  I made him throw it away, however later that week I swore a little girl rocking red corn rolls.

6. Speaking of hair, a clean-cut brother is an international standard.  Fresh fades and edges are legendary on a GQ man, so how do achieve this same look when an entire country runs on generator and has no electricity to run clippers?  Easy.  You take the actual razor blade and bind it (tape, glue, rubber band) to a small-tooth comb and comb out the style in a back and forth motion.  The client sits REAL still.  Its nothing but a thing.  The edging, take a new blade and place it on the hair lining in true Cicely in Color purple style and don’t move!

5.  Some luxuries are not affordable for all, but you always need a way to clean up a mess. So instead of pampers, your babies who are not toilet trained can be seen waddling around in plastic sacks.  Your basic Wal-mart sack serves as a durable diaper for all the children running amidst in any third-world country.  Now your conscience, fashion forward mothers will wrap some cloth around the plastic pamper in order to add a little something to it, but the concept is clear.  Plastic is a running stomach’s best friend. 

4.  STOP! DANGER!  Dennis told me when driving down the street.  See there was a small tree, a bush planted in the MIDDLE of the gravel road; the same road we drove down just yesterday and nothing was there.  Seems like a small forest grew overnight.  In the middle of cemented road.  Turns out, there was pothole, a little dangerous for cars and the warning sign is a TREE.  The neighborhood will put trees and bushes in any potholes that can tear up your car.  It’s the neighborhood symbol for WATCH OUT!  Forget your orange cone, put tree bark there.  It will get the point across.

3.  I loved the wedding my home girl had.  It was beautiful classic, but it made the top three spot of CSCs.  I am not a wedding guru, yet I know not to walk down the aisle before the wedding starts.  Something about the bride walking down a special cloth or red carpet.  Well, they don’t have enough money or fabric to cover the full aisle, so two older women stood beside the bride, placed a towel down at her feet.  The bride stepped on and the other woman placed her towel down.  When the bride moved ahead, the first woman grabbed the first towel and ran around her friend and place it down in front of the bride.  This continued ALL THE WAY DOWN the aisle.   

2. Mayonnaise I heard it was a popular black people food.  I don’t know. My other ethnicities come out in the food department, a lot of cliché food I don’t do but mayonnaise is the SAUCE of the year in Liberia.  I ordered potato skins and sour cream, out comes mayonnaise.  The manager explained, is a cream like substance and it can sour.  Chicken and blue cheese dressing?  I got mayonnaise with cheese chunks.  Fish and tater sauce, yep mayonnaise again.  Mayonnaise is sold in the streets in little crack baggies, just incase a quickie hit is needed. 

1.  Getting a pedicure is a stress reliever and a priority beauty regiment.  Eddie Murphy made it important for a woman to check out the condition of her feet and get proper care for all trouble spots.  So the shaving of dead skin with the razor blade is appreciated.  With all the walking, dancing, shoe wearing, we have to help hard areas and dead skin remove to keep our feet baby soft smooth. Yet, I went to a new shop and I guess the young girl couldn’t find her razor (or never had one) because without hesitation, she grabbed some scissors and opened them and started to scrape the heels of my feet.  These regular cutting scissors were used to remove calluses, dead skin, corns, and even clean under the toe, all while my foot was held hostage.  But, it did the job done.

Liberia is a liberated country.  A country of slaves.  Freed men who left American soil and American bondage to make the journey back home.  Back to Africa.  Men who were in full AMISTAD mode.  They are the ones who followed the Marcus Garvey motion, jumped back on the boat and went HOME.

And they landed on some land, saw the Africans sitting there, cooking fufu, running around in their huts, singing songs and beating on their drums.  Instead of grabbing some kente’ cloth and finding a place in the Congo line, they declared these native Africans (indigenous people) uncivilized and felt that it was their duty as exposed African-Americans to colonize and create this country to what it should be.

See, all the Ex-slaves could be identified because their names had American context.  They were Harrisons, Johnsons, Parkers, Smiths, and any other name that had been branded into their pseudo by whip or threat of a whip.  So the building, creating, and conception of this new government came from all the imported Africans and they let none of the Africans who were already there part of the process. 

In fact, it seems that they a lot from their time in the states because what they created once they finished was an oppressing system that left the ingenious African out of basically everything.  Americanized Africans where the ones who could send their children to school, gain governmental posts, and build a strong foundation for their family and assets.  And so while they became stronger and more liberated, just like their country promised, well the Africans who stayed on the land, the ones smart enough to avoid being captured and sent to their slave world, they became more ostracized in their own world.

But, don’t fret. Equality was possible for every member of the country.  All you had to do was throw away your native, indigenous family name and create an American last name.  Once you do this, your status would change and all the doors that were shut to you would slowly creep open.  So basically once you lose your identity, you could gain a new one.  Erase your family history and worth in order to be something in life.

Now this sounds all civil rights movement, but these things were still occurring in 1980’s.  This repression only elevated a little once the ingenious people were able to put one of their own into a presidential post (Go Obama!). But of course like in every great Negro novel, drama prevailed…but that is another post.

So in Liberia, the liberated land…a country that has been freed, released from boundaries (dictionary quote)…there wasn’t a true sentiment of that statement for all people and today, when you ride down the streets…. you see the results of that.

Even though Liberia is coming out of a war (which partial stemmed from the feelings of an oppressed group against the powers that be), there are people who have something to work with and then majority who walk the streets in full hustle mode because there is nothing for them at all. So they grind the roads trying to make what little change can help them through the night until they wake up in the morning to begin this race all over again.  This day-by-day prioritizing puts them in a predicament that it is near impossible to change their future. Any time they take away from the day to better themselves is potential money that doesn’t come home. So how do they take a literacy class, start school, pay for children’s education, sacrifice any one thing to improve themselves?  Them becoming better is putting their family in a worse situation.  It is the pendulum that doesn’t stop swing.

And we did this to ourselves.  I had often had a vision of a black nation. One of Kwanzaa celebrations and harmony, what would we be if we didn’t have the history of slavery, poor education, Jim Crow discrimination, and unfair racism and in all my vision I would have never predicted what I witness and see in Liberia.  The fact that we as brothers and sisters of the same skin were able to purposed with hold the rights that we argued, fought, died to have on another people because we were afford the power to do so. 

So what is it, is it us? Are we like that as a black people? Or is that human nature, to gain on others backs?  Is it the testorone in men that want to conquer?  What is the factor that corrupts us as people to close our eyes to others in order to be superior?

More to come…

I upped my workout game today.  I went to look for some dumbbells.  Yep, get that body tone thing on. So when I wave, I got that sexy triceps bulge popping off. Not that granny fat thing on the arms.  So I went to my co-worker who let me know he works out to see if he could snag me a couple of weights.

No problem.  Right?

Well it turns out that the only way I could get my dumbbells would be to get them custom made.  Straight from the iron yard.  A trip though the craziness of Liberia, through the hectic schedule of mid-day life, so I can get through to the iron ore of the capital city, a journey I decided to send someone else on, with my payment.  My goal.  Eight-pound dumbbells.

So I put in the order and five days later, I received them. 

Two weights.  With eight pound iron circles on each side of one iron bar.  Eight-pound dumbbells, correct? I mean, yeah. It was my fault to not simplify the instructions to say that the weight should ADD UP to eight pounds.  So, I sent it back.

The next morning when I was jogging, I peeped a house on the road with a lot of brothers pumping iron.  When I looked closer, it wasn’t just iron…it was concrete!  They had a bar for bench presses and both ends were dipped in concrete blocks and they were pumping away like it was nothing.  No idea of how much it was, gauging there strengthen intake or nothing.  Just Raw workout in the cuff.

I got my dumbbells back shortly after that and they shaved off the extra four pounds. I think, I mean the balls on the end of the iron were smaller but there was no number that allowed me to measure my workout goals.  In fact, I didn’t even account for the two-inch middle bar and how much my weight really weighs.  I know that I am lifting iron and that is it.